What is Climate Change Doing Now?

Wavier jet stream 'may drive weather shift.' new research suggests that the main system that helps determine the weather over northern Europe and North America may be changing. The study shows that the so-called jet stream has increasingly taken a longer, meandering path - More

Vulcanology

Under Active Volcanoes, Cold Magma Waits for Heat

There's no bubbling pool of lava under the world's liveliest volcanoes, but rather magma in cold storage, waiting for a splash of heat to wake up. 

Ice Giants

Dunure Castle and Labyrinth on Ayrshire coast, Scotland. According to Irish and English ancient legends the fairies danced on labyrinth spirals in the moonlight; in accordance to Norwegian popular beliefs, the stone rows were made by ice-giants; in Swedish tales labyrinths mark the entrance into underground palaces. Most modern researchers consider labyrinths religious structures.

Port Royal, Jamaica

Once referred to as the ‘Wickedest City on Earth’ (because of its rampant piracy, prostitution and rum consumption), part of Port Royal sank after an earthquake in 1692. The ruins scattered in the Kingston Harbor, and currently, the remains of the city encompasses 13 acres at depths of up to 40 feet.

Lake Kaindy, Kazakhstan

Lake Kaindy is a 400-meter-long lake in Kazakhstan that reaches depths near 30 meters in some areas. It is located 129 kilometers east-southeast of the city of Almaty and is 2,000 meters above sea level. The lake was created as the result of an enormous limestone landslide, triggered by the 1911 Kebin earthquake. The track to Lake Kaindy has many scenic views to the Saty Gorge, the Chilik Valley, and the Kaindy Gorge. Dried-out trunks of submerged Picea schrenkiana trees rise above the surface.

99thingstodobeforeidie

Daily Comic Relief

Fisherman catches rare footage of marlin attack

A 600-pound blue marlin jumps completely out of the water while chasing a 25-pound dorado off Costa Rica; seasoned skippers had never seen anything like it

Fishermen trolling the waters off Los Suenos, Costa Rica, witnessed a rare and remarkable sight while fishing for sailfish and dorado a week ago. A blue marlin, estimated at 600 pounds, was chasing a 25-pound dorado, causing quite a stir in the water. The fish, neither of which was hooked, put on an impressive aerial display, with the huge marlin coming completely out of the water and the dorado catching big-time air.
Capt. Mark Garry aboard Fishizzle managed to capture the amazing moments on video. The slow-motion part is especially dazzling, with the most incredible leap by the fish starting at the 2:04 mark:
Back on shore, Garry showed the video of the marlin attack to several seasoned Costa Rica fishermen and none of them had ever seen anything like it.

 

“Obviously neither did we,” Garry wrote on his YouTube post. So, what became of the dorado?
The fisherman doesn’t know for sure, but it might have escaped using an ingenious plan for evading the attacking marlin.
“The marlin made several attempts at the dorado, and the last we saw of both of them was they passed five feet away from us [and] the dorado was on the tail of the marlin,” Gary said. “I guess that’s the farthest place from his bill.”
Now that’s a smart dorado.

How Wolves Change Rivers

(YouTube link)

Our natural ecosystem is a delicate balance. When you take one part of it away, the results can be unforeseen and even catastrophic. But Sustainable Man tells us a story of one case of man correcting that imbalance. In 1995, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after being absent for 70 years. In the 19 years since, the park has undergone a number of astonishing changes that can be traced to the wolves. By the time the video was ending, I fully expected to hear “The Circle of Life.” The moral of the story, as you can guess, is "Don't mess with Mother Nature."

How Pronghorn Newborns Survive

Mammal species are born mostly helpless and vulnerable to predators. Many hide their babies in nests, but pronghorn antelopes are born on the open range, while coyotes wait for an easy snack. And to complicate matters, they always have twins. But Stacey Dunn, who studies pronghorns, tells us that pronghorn fawns are born for camouflage. They are born, they flatten themselves against the ground, and they don’t make a sound. Trying to find them in the grass is not easy for coyotes or humans. And the mother drops each twin in a different location.

Mothers return every three or four hours for nursing, day and night, staying away in between so as not to reveal the babies' location. The coyotes, of course, are watching, tracking the mothers. Over the weeks, the young ones are getting stronger, but when their mothers go, they curl back down, getting quiet again.

Fawns born in April stay quiet till June.

"The technique works," writes Craig. Researchers can see them across a meadow, when the mothers are nursing, but once the baby goes back down to the ground, it vanishes. "I've almost stepped on them without realizing they were there," Stacey told me.

Hey, your baby would be quiet, too, if his life depended on it! The pronghorn fawns learn to walk and run quickly, but they live on mothers milk for months. Dunn has quite a few pictures of pronghorns hiding in the grass, which you’ll have to study if you’re ever to see them. 

Snake handling pastor died after being bitten by snake

Pastor Jamie Coots from Middlesboro, Kentucky died on Saturday night after he was bitten by a snake.

According to the Middlesboro Police Department, emergency crews responded to reports of a possible snakebite victim at around 8:30pm, but say the victim had already left the scene by the time they arrived.

Police say they found Coots at his home with an apparent snakebite to his hand. Officials say EMS responders explained the dangers of not treating the wound, but that Coots still refused to be transferred.

Pastor Coots filmed last year.

YouTube link.

Police and EMS returned to the scene an hour later to find Coots dead. Coots was the pastor of Full Gospel Tabernacle in jesus Name cult in Middlesboro.

The Python Patrol

Time was you could buy a Burmese python in Florida, but the cute little snakes sold at carnivals eventually became 20-foot-long eating machines, so a lot of them were freed into the Everglades. Now they are an invasive species that has all but wiped out rabbits, raccoons, bobcats, and other small mammals from the park. It has been estimated that there are around 100,000 Burmese pythons in Florida -a place where they do not naturally exist. In 2008, the Nature Conservancy began training citizens to spot and report pythons, and training wildlife professionals to capture them. This is the Python Patrol.

The Python Patrol program has since trained more than 450 responders and 2,625 detectors, including field scientists, state wildlife commission staff, state park service personnel, utility workers for the city of Miami—anyone likely to encounter non-native snakes in the field—and even a group of war veterans known as the Swamp Apes. One trainee, 70-year-old Eric Raits, has now caught three pythons while working as a tour guide at Shark Valley Tram Tours in Everglades. Once, lacking a bag into which to deposit the snake, he simply held on to the 9-foot python for the remaining half of the two-hour tour. “I was sitting in the backwards-facing seat with the snake coiled up around my arm,” he says. “Unsurprisingly, no one sat in the two rows closest to me. They were all in the back, sitting on each other’s laps.”

The aim of the Python Patrol is to limit the spread of the pythons, so scientists are still working on the problem of eradicating them. But the program has had some success, and the volunteers are also being trained in spotting other invasive species that threaten Florida’s ecology. Read about Florida’s invasive species problem and the Python Patrol’s efforts at The Nature Conservancy.

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Ain't nothing but a thing ...

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Pluto is a PLANET - don't let them tell any different ... !

Today is -  Pluto Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our readers today have been in:

The Americas

Lima, Peru

Vancouver, Templeton, Thunder Bay, Ottawa, Mississauga, Byward Market and Montreal, Canada

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The Bottom, Sint Eustatius and Saba

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Europe

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Koeln, Rothe Erde and Nuremberg, Germany

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Africa 

Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa

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Tunis Tunisia

Cairo and Al Jizah, Egypt

Rabat, Morocco

Pacific

Sampaloc and Cebu City, Philippines

Surrey Hills and Homebush, Australia

Today in History

1478		George, the Duke of Clarence, who had opposed his brother Edward IV, is murdered in the Tower of London.
1688		Quakers in Germantown, Pa. adopt the fist formal antislavery resolution in America.
1813		Czar Alexander enters Warsaw at the head of his Army.
1861		Victor Emmanuel II becomes the first King of Italy.
1861		Jefferson F. Davis is inaugurated as the Confederacy's provisional president at a ceremony held in Montgomery, Ala.
1865		Union troops force the Confederates to abandon Fort Anderson, N.C.
1878		The bitter and bloody Lincoln County War begins with the murder of Billy the Kid's mentor, Englishman rancher John Tunstall.
1885		The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, is published in New York.
1907		600,000 tons of grain are sent to Russia to relieve the famine there.
1920		Vuillemin and Chalus complete their first flight over the Sahara Desert.
1932		Manchurian independence is formally declared.
1935		Rome reports sending troops to Italian Somalia.
1939		The Golden Gate Exposition opens in San Francisco.
1943		German General Erwin Rommel takes three towns in Tunisia, North Africa.
1944		The U.S. Army and Marines invade Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific.
1945		U.S. Marines storm ashore at Iwo Jima.
1954		East and West Berlin drop thousands of propaganda leaflets on each other after the end of a month long truce.
1962		Robert F. Kennedy says that U.S. troops will stay in Vietnam until Communism is defeated.
1964		The United States cuts military aid to five nations in reprisal for having trade relations with Cuba.
1967		The National Art Gallery in Washington agrees to buy a Da Vinci for a record $5 million.
1968		Three U.S. pilots that were held by the Vietnamese arrive in Washington.
1972		The California Supreme Court voids the death penalty.
1974		Randolph Hearst is to give $2 million in free food for the poor in order to open talks for his daughter Patty.
1982		Mexico devalues the peso by 30 percent to fight an economic slide.

Non Sequitur

'Odd French couple' found in deathly embrace

The dead bodies of a woman of 94 and a man of 55 have been found locked in an embrace in the flat they shared in the south-west French city of Bordeaux. Emergency services entered the flat after being alerted by a caretaker, whose suspicions were aroused by the smell on the stairs. They had lived together for five years or more, since the woman took the man in from a life on the streets.
When a fall two years ago largely confined her to the flat, he stayed on. Forensics experts believe the man, Didier Delavigne, died first and the woman, Elisabeth Devidas, died shortly afterwards. She was found on Monday afternoon with her arm wrapped around her companion in their bed in the flat, close to Bordeaux railway station.

People who knew them said they had made an "odd couple of iconoclasts", walking hand in hand in the street at the start of their relationship. "She was no ordinary woman, very free, someone who led her own life," said Nicole, a neighbor in the block of flats. "She was a character. When she took in this man... she knew what people were saying behind her back. She didn't give a damn. She defied the malicious tongues. She'd tell them 'We even got married!' or 'He's my boyfriend, so what?'"
"They say he was homeless and you could smell the wine from 10 meters away," Heri Rananaivoson, the caretaker, recalled of Mr Delavigne, when he first made his appearance six or seven years ago. But he seems to have changed after he met Ms Devidas, for whom he initially ran errands before moving in. "I saw him on the mend," said Mr Rananaivoson. "He stopped smelling of alcohol." The last time he saw Mr Delavigne, at the beginning of the month, he was "looking well". Nicole said she believed both Mr Delavigne and Ms Devidas had had a hard life. "What a beautiful tragedy," she added.

Pretty People Are Easily Forgotten

Pretty People Are Easily Forgotten

New studies are showing that the more symmetrical your face is, the less likely you'll recognize that person if you see them again. Trace explains how the human brain gets bored with symmetry, and how it loves to seek out and remember uniqueness!

Football club insist player is 17, not 41

Lazio have threatened legal action against those who have questioned the legitimacy of the age of their 17-year-old Cameroonian player Joseph Minala. The Italian side stated that his birth certificate is "absolutely legitimate". Lazio added: "We reserve the right to take action against those responsible for the protection of the good name of the company and the footballer."

The midfielder also issued a statement via the club's website denying he told an African website he was 41. He said: "I have read the alleged statements posted on the website senego.net in which it says I confessed my real age which was different to what was stated in my [official] documents. They are false statements that have been attributed to me by people who do not know." Minala joined the Rome club last summer and recently played for them in the Viareggio Cup youth tournament.

Italian journalist Max Evangelista, who reports on Lazio's youth team, said any suggestions the player was 41 were "unbelievable". He said Minala had scored five goals and made six assists this season for Lazio's youth team, who are the holders of the national title. "He is a very reactive player. You could never say he is 41," he said." When you are surrounded by players running like devils around you, in my opinion it is very tough to be 41.
"He runs, he is fast. It is unbelievable news, that is why Lazio felt the need to deny it. He was in an orphanage for a couple of years in Cameroon, then he had to face the situation here by himself. It is a controversial story because the face of the player is not that of a 17-year-old guy. On his face there is sign of his previous life, which was not a happy life. That is it. Period. There is nothing else that makes you think he is 41. He is a kid with the head of a kid. He only wants to play football as he did on the road years ago barefoot. That is the only thing he is focused on and being a talent because he is a talent."

Long lines as Spanish supermarket offers free bread and water to customers

A supermarket in Valencia is flooded with desperate customers every time it offers 200 free bottles of water and bread baguettes at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Staff at the Eroski food store in Carcaixent (Valencia) have started handing out basic goods to customers as part of a campaign to help those struggling to make ends meet. The freebies are basic: one baguette and one bottle of water per customer.

The shoppers aren’t necessarily just homeless people as one might expect, but customers who regularly buy at the supermarket and have to show a bill from a previous shop at the same store.
“A line forms before we open up the store, people want to make sure they get their basic goods,” an Eroski manager said. “Others who notice the line outside the supermarket don’t mind waiting in line for a while either as soon as they find out there’s free bread and water.” Every Tuesday, the line of students, housewives, pensioners and ordinary folk keeps getting bigger.

Did you know ...

Just why are monarch butterflies disappearing?

That a judge bans man from the internet

That 26 children or teens have died in Florida stand your ground vases

That I can't believe it's not kristallnacht